The performer "Sober Sue" appeared on stage in New York, billed as the girl who never laughed. The theater offered a prize of $100 to anyone who could make her smile. People from the audience, as well as professional comedians, all accepted the challenge, but all failed. Sober Sue never so much as cracked a grin. The truth was only revealed after her run at the theater was over. It was impossible for her to laugh because her facial muscles were paralyzed. More…

The earliest reference to the Old Librarian's Almanack is found In 1907, when the novelist Edmund Lester Pearson mentioned it in his Boston Evening Transcript column. It was, he said, a small almanac from 1773 that contained the "opinion and counsel" of a curmudgeonly librarian whose ideas were strikingly non-modern. Two years later, Pearson arranged for the reprinting of the Almanack, and it was favorably reviewed by many newspapers which accepted it as an authentic 18th-Century curiosity. Very few people realized that there was no Old Librarian. Pearson himself had written the Almanack as a joke.

Six years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft, aviation technology was still fairly primitive. Planes could only fly a few miles. But in 1909, Massachusetts inventor Wallace Tillinghast announced a breakthrough, claiming to have built a plane capable of flying 300 miles. His announcement generated enormous excitement. In the next few weeks thousands of people throughout New England reported seeing his plane flying in the sky at night. But as the months went by and Tillinghast failed to offer any tangible proof of his claims, the media came to realize he had no airplane. One man confessed that the lights people had seen in the sky were actually small lanterns he had tied to the legs of owls as a practical joke. More…

The painting "Sunset over the Adriatic" won praise from critics when it was displayed at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in March 1910. It was said to be the work of J.R. Boronali, proponent of a new school of painting called "excessivism". One collector offered to buy the work for 400 francs. But after a few days the truth was revealed. Boronali was actually a donkey named Lolo who had "painted" by having a brush tied to his tail. The stunt was dreamed up by art critic Roland Dorgelès as a way to play a joke on his Impressionist painter friends. [A World Elsewhere]

On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy's most powerful battleship. But the next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the visitors hadn't been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. They had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. More…

When amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson unearthed a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England, the fossil was hailed as the long-sought missing link between man and ape. For almost forty years the authenticity of the Piltdown fossil remained unquestioned, until 1953, when researchers at the British Museum took a closer look and realized the fossil was a fake. The skull belonged to a prehistoric human, whereas the jawbone came from a modern orangutan. More…

Frederick Rodman Law was a well-known daredevil active in the early 20th century. His stunts included parachuting from the top of the Statue of Liberty and jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. In May 1912, a pedestrian in Washington DC exclaimed that Law appeared to be scaling the monument without permission — and was already a third of the way up. A huge crowd gathered to watch the feat. But when the police arrived to apprehend Law when he came down, they realized that what had resembled a human figure was actually a damp spot on the side of the monument caused by the previous night's rain. More…

Paul Chabas's painting "September Morn" won a gold medal of honor in 1912 at the Paris Salon. But when copies of the painting made their way to America, it provoked a bitter controversy about nudity, art, and public morality. Thanks to this controversy, September Morn became one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century, selling millions of copies. Publicist Harry Reichenbach later claimed to have started the controversy by complaining to moral censors about the indecency of the painting. He didn't actually feel the painting was indecent. He was cynically manipulating the self-righteous moralists in order to sell copies of the painting. More…

In 1916 a slender volume of poetry introduced the Spectric school of poetry to the world. The Spectric philosophy, as explained by its founders, was to embrace the immediacy of experience, even if that experience could not be expressed rationally. Soon Spectrism had attracted a growing band of followers. But despite repeated requests for meetings and interviews, the two founders of Spectrism never appeared in public. This led to rumors of a hoax, rumors that were confirmed in 1918 when the poet Witter Bynner admitted that he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke were the true creative forces behind Spectric poetry. Their goal had been to parody the overly pompous experimentalism that was the fad of the moment. More…

Journalist H.L. Mencken published an article in the New York Evening Mail describing the history of the bathtub in America, noting that people were slow to accept tubs, believing they were dangerous to health. This attitude, Mencken said, changed when President Millard Fillmore became the first president to install a tub in the White House. Mencken's history of the bathtub wasn't true. He intended it as a joke, but few people recognized it as such. Details from Mencken's article began to appear in other papers. One scholar included the tale in a history of hygiene. To this day, many people still believe that Mencken's fake history of the bathtub is true. More…

Poinsettias are one of the most popular plants in the world. They account for one quarter of the annual sales of all flowering potted plants. However, it's widely believed that they're poisonous. "One poinsettia leaf can kill a child," is a warning that's been repeated often over the years. This belief is a myth. Poinsettias, although not edible, have low toxicity. The belief that they're poisonous traces back to a rumor that surfaced in 1919, alleging that a child in Hawaii died after eating a poinsettia leaf. The death was hearsay. However, the rumor was believed by several Hawaiian doctors, and through them the story was transmitted to the broader scientific community. As a result, for decades health professionals warned the public about the danger posed by poinsettias. It wasn't until the early 1970s that the scientific community realized its error and began an effort to restore the plant's reputation. More…

The White Pine Monograph Series documented the architecture of the quaint Massachusetts town of Stotham. The problem was, Stotham didn't actually exist. More…

Charles Ponzi (1883-1949), an Italian immigrant living in Boston in the early twentieth century, was said by his worshipful followers to have "discovered money." In fact, what he really discovered was a way to bilk the public out of millions of dollars by means of a financial pyramid scheme. There were pyramid schemes before Ponzi came along, but his was so outrageous that this type of scam has ever since borne his name. More…

In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie's Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked. More…

In November 1922 Howard Carter located the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun. By February he and his team had unsealed the door of the Burial Chamber. But a mere two months later, on April 5, 1923, the sponsor of his expedition, Lord Carnarvon, died in his Cairo hotel room, having succumbed to a bacterial infection caused by a mosquito bite. The media immediately speculated that Carnarvon had fallen victim to King Tut's Curse. This curse supposedly promised death to all who violated his tomb. More…

Paul Jordan Smith, a Los Angeles-based novelist, was upset that his wife's art was panned by critics as being too "old school". So he devised an elaborate spoof of modern art. He submitted crude works of his own creation to exhibitions, claiming they were the work of a Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch (a name he had invented), the founder of the Disumbrationist School of Art (another invention of his). As anticipated, the works were praised by critics. When Smith revealed the hoax to the LA Times in 1927, he argued that it showed that the art currently in fashion was "poppycock" promoted by critics who knew very little about art. More…

In 1924, a seventeen-year-old farmer, Emile Fradin, discovered an underground chamber that contained many mysterious artifacts. He did so while plowing a field on his grandfather's property in Glozel (near Vichy, in central France). More…

A group of miners claimed that gorilla-like creatures (which they called "mountain devils") attacked them in the woods near Mt. St. Helens. The miners retreated into a log cabin, but their attackers threw rocks down onto them throughout the night. The story was reported widely. However, a local game warden declared the story was "bunk." A search party found no evidence of any gorillas or devils. The rocks may have been the work of teenagers at a nearby YMCA summer camp who had a tradition of throwing stones down the hill. Decades later, one of the miners, Fred Beck, wrote an account of the incident titled I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens. [wikipedia]

In 1924 a man calling himself Lafayette Mulligan, claiming to be the social secretary of the Mayor of Boston, presented the Prince of Wales with the key to the City of Boston and invited him to visit the city, while the Prince was vacationing in Massachusetts. However, the Boston Mayor had no idea who Lafayette Mulligan was. In fact, Lafayette Mulligan was the invention of pranksters trying to embarrass the Irish Mayor, whose anti-British sentiment was well known. 'Lafayette Mulligan' subsequently became a running gag, and for some years lent its name to the prank of sending spurious invitations to non-existent events. More…

In 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa where she stayed for nine months. On her return she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, which was published in 1928. It portrayed Samoa as a gentle, easy-going society where teenagers grew up free of sexual hang-ups. Premarital sex was common. Rape was unheard of. Young people grew to adulthood without enduring the adolescent trauma typical in western countries. She used these findings to support her thesis that culture, not biology, determines human behavior and personality. The book became an anthropological classic, read by generations of college students. But In 1983 New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman challenged her claims, claiming that Mead had been taken in by a hoax. More…

After a heavy snowfall, the footprints of a large animal were found on the campus of Cornell University, leading up to the shore of the frozen Beebe Lake. A hole in the ice indicated that the animal must have fallen in and drowned. A zoologist examined the tracks and identified them as those of a rhinoceros. But the tracks turned out to be the work of Cornell student Hugh Troy who had created them using a rhino-foot wastepaper basket borrowed from a professor's house. More…

During the 1920s, Austrian scientist Paul Kammerer designed an experiment involving a species called the Midwife Toad. He wanted to prove that Lamarckian inheritance was possible. When his experiment produced positive results, the scientitic community was stunned. That is, until researchers had a chance to examine his toads more closely. More…